Investigative website Cobrapost has claimed that Babri Masjid Demolition on December 1992 was an act of planned sabotage

In an elaborate sting operation, codenamed Operation Janmabhoomi, Cobrapost unearths the conspiracy and exposes the conspirators behind the demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, showing them confessing to how they laid out an elaborate plan and executed it with precision of a military operation.

The demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 was not a case of an unruly mob going out of control, as has been claimed all along by various Sangh Parivar activists, but the result of an elaborate plan -- "the biggest conspiracy of all times" -- by the various wings of the Sangh parivar executed with precision by trained volunteers, according to a sting operation by Cobrapost.

Had meant to blog this excellent piece by Pratap Bhanu Mehta earlier but had remained caught up with the tapes and the year-end stuff, so without any further delay:

If the BJP has any political imagination, or any understanding of Hinduism, it ought to now make a dramatic gesture. It has made its point about history. But now it could help transcend that history by eschewing plans for dramatic temples at Ayodhya. Instead, push for Ayodhya as a shared space, where Ram becomes a symbol of peace and compassion rather than a threatening structure of stone. Instead of constantly being on the defensive, the BJP could at one stroke lay to rest so many ghosts that still haunt it. It needs a new imaginative politics.Finally, there is the space of ideas. What are the big ideas on corruption that the BJP wants to champion? Does it want to take the lead in political finance? Does it want to take the lead in police reform? If it does not occupy this space quickly, mere negativism will not take it too far. It still needs to show that it can be more than an opposition party.

The troubling feature of India is the growing chasm between popular historical memory and the officially endorsed ‘nation-building’ history. In the popular perception, there was widespread medieval vandalism and India is dotted with physical evidence of a shrine that was either destroyed or whose denominational character was changed. Yet, since the early 1970s, historians whose works are deemed ‘respectable’ have wilfully glossed over themes that apparently run counter to an idyllic syncretic or composite culture. In schools and universities, narrative history has been junked in favour of a crude economism. It is somehow felt that ‘nation-building’ will be better served by focussing on the economic intricacies of feudal societies rather than the bigoted excesses of Aurangzeb. Outright denial or obfuscation has become the hallmark of a country with a rich history and poor historians.

Unfortunately, the experiments with disingenuity have not really worked. Academic historians constituted themselves into a cosy club during the Ayodhya agitation claiming that the whole Ram Janmabhoomi belief was an elaborate hoax and, most likely, a sinister colonial creation. No shrine, they insisted, had been destroyed to make way for a mosque in 1528. Far from neutralizing the Ram bhakts, this negationism actually drove the devout into greater bouts of frenzy, culminating in the demolition of the 16th-century shrine. Had the more pertinent question — Must India spend its energies overturning medieval wrongs? — been asked, it is entirely possible that society would not have been so damagingly polarized. The battle to set back the clock of history was actually a crusade to right the wrongs of historians.